Mudslides Hit Scarred Laguna : Flooding: A choking sea of runoff and debris from fire-ravaged hillsides damages up to 25 homes, clogs roads and compounds the misery of the stricken city. No one is seriously injured.

Just two weeks after fire ravaged this once-tranquil community, the floods came Thursday, pounding homes, closing major roads and scooping up cars and assorted debris in a river of mud that was made more powerful by the barren state of the scorched hillsides.

As many as 25 houses suffered some damage in the pre-dawn torrent of water and mud, officials said, and three homes were hit with major flooding that reached as high as five feet in ground-level rooms. Also deluged in a sea of mud was the Irvine Bowl--the outdoor amphitheater in Laguna Beach that is home to the annual Pageant of the Masters.

Dozens of residents fought the mud and water to flee their homes and neighborhoods, but no one was seriously injured.

Even as residents and city officials sought to clean up the mess caused by Thursday’s rainfall, they carted out sandbags and braced for the prospect of more rains expected through this morning. As Police Chief Neil J. Purcell Jr. said, echoing the concerns of many in the city, “Right now we don’t need any rain of any degree.”

Thursday’s rains were not all that heavy--one-sixteenth of an inch by the city’s count--but officials said they had so little time to sandbag and stabilize the ground after last month’s fire that the area was ripe for mudslides. Indeed, workers did not have time to secure some hay bales meant to slow the downhill rush of rainwater, and many lurched down city streets in the flood.

“It was the most frightening thing I’ve ever experienced,” said Alison MacLeod, a 42-year-old management consultant who lives in the Canyon Acres neighborhood and managed to find refuge in a neighbor’s home. “It had no direction. The water was just everywhere--behind you, in front of you, you couldn’t get out. We were just completely stranded.”

Laguna Beach residents who live in hillside areas said they awoke between 4 and 5 a.m. to the sound of thunderous rain and the rivers of debris passing by their homes. Some looked out windows to see patio furniture, tree stumps and even once-parked cars streaming past them on streets and slopes.

Canyon Acres resident Maren Blacketer, 37, played the part of Paul Revere, her neighbors said.

Blacketer, who grew up in the area, raced outside to her truck once she heard the rain start and sped up and down the street, honking her horn and warning neighbors to get out.

“When it first started sprinkling, I knew, I knew there was nothing to hold it,” she said.

It was a surreal scene for her neighbor, 45-year-old David Battersby, as he watched a dozen cars stream driverless down Canyon Acres Drive, stacking up at the intersection. “They were just down there like Tinkertoys banging up against each other,” he said.

Canyon Acres was one of several Laguna Beach neighborhoods that suffered a double dose of misfortune--ravaged in the wildfire of two weeks ago and caught again in Thursday’s slides.

The neighborhood around Park Avenue--hit in the fire--also sustained flooding, as did the High Drive neighborhood, Irvine Bowl Park and the area behind Laguna Beach City Hall, which backs up against a steep bluff that was scorched in the fire.

For many, this month’s sequence of events was numbing.

“I thought I was going to have a quiet morning,” Mayor Lida Lenney said as she looked out her office window at the mud-caked downtown streets. “My God, what a mess,” she said.

“It’s like this is a test and somebody’s saying, ‘OK, if you pass this test, we’ll give you a harder one,’ ” Lenney said as she prepared to visit some of the city’s mud-filled houses. “We’re really ready to say, ‘No more tests.’ ”

Park Avenue and Laguna Canyon Road--the city’s main artery north to the freeway--were closed because of the flooding, and the mudslides blocked school buses from picking up children. But even amid the confusion, local schools stayed open, and Laguna Beach Unified School District Supt. Paul M. Possemato said attendance was not greatly affected at most schools.

Separate mudslides in the rural, eastern part of Orange County also closed Ortega Highway from La Pata Avenue just east of San Juan Capistrano to the Riverside County line. But sheriff’s officials said they had no reports of residential damage.

In Malibu and Calabasas, where fires raced through the canyons last week, a mudslide shut down all but one lane of Pacific Coast Highway as residents filled sandbags in anticipation of the next round of slides. The mud and debris on the highway took about six hours to clear.

In Laguna Beach, residents still reeling from the fire that destroyed more than 300 homes were left Thursday to ponder whether to stay or flee the latest threat. Some had already made up their minds.

After the fire burned down a home across the street from hers, Susanne Dale, 48, was already making plans to pack up her four children and move by the end of the year. But after she woke up Thursday to find boulders pummeling her back yard and her children’s toys swimming into the street, she sped up her plan and had a moving van outside by Thursday morning.

Her landlord threatened Thursday to keep her security deposit if she does not give 30 days’ notice, but Dale does not care. “I’m moving. It is so dangerous to be here, I want to get out before the evening. I can’t stay here,” she said.

The mudslide near the downtown area began in the middle of the night in a steep canyon off Park Avenue about 100 yards uphill from the intersection of Park and Wendt Terrace. There, a rush of mud and water breached a barrier of hay bales set up by county workers to slow and divert runoff from the barren hillsides.

Government crews had been working since last week to clear brush from drainage channels and deposit the bales of hay in rows around the area to avoid flooding. But city officials said crews did not have time after the fire to secure all the hay bales with wooden stakes, allowing some--but not all--to float away amid the muck.

“This thing just hit and it wouldn’t quit,” said Purcell, who estimated that work crews would need another 10 days to guard against further floods and mudslides through sandbagging, hay bales and other anti-erosion measures.

Police and fire officials said crews did all they could in the time they had.

“In our estimation, those hay bales did the job they were put there to do. Without those in place, the damage would have been much more severe,” said Richard Richardson, a city firefighter.

The rampaging water cut a mucky course some 60 feet across and about three-quarters of a mile long through the streets and back yards of a quaint neighborhood of older homes and cottages behind Laguna Beach High School.

Some of the most severe flooding occurred on Browncroft Road, where a portion of the street was submerged under three to four feet of water. Muddy stains reached up three feet on the sides of some homes, and one to two feet of mud covered many driveways.

Rushing water carried two cars away on Wilcox Drive as well as two other vehicles on Browncroft. Other cars were damaged as rising water filled garages. Debris was everywhere.

Picnic tables, a large storage shed, a lawn mower, tree trunks, pots and lighting fixtures were all swept away along the path of the flood. Brick walls and fences fell under the torrent. A heavy air-conditioning unit was ripped from its foundation at one home.

“We have seen the power of fire and now we have seen the power of water. They are working side by side right now,” said Henry R. Philtz, an Orange County public works supervisor overseeing some of the cleanup operations Thursday.

At 611 Griffith Way, Thomas Denny said he walked out into waist-deep water to help his neighbors, whose home was inundated with thick mud that had crashed through the windows and doors.

“It was like going out into rapids,” Denny said. “Then I saw two stereo speakers float by.”

At Browncroft Road, Sandi Terry was awakened by the rain and looked out the window to see a neighbor’s Honda Civic floating by.

“I thought to myself, ‘We’re in hot water now,’ ” Terry said.

Mark Duran, 19, stood ankle-deep in mud just inside the front door of his apartment at 605 Griffith Way. “It’s just too much,” he said, wiping a mud-smeared hand across his forehead. “First the fires and now this. How much more can we take?”

He pointed to a sofa tossed across the living room by the muddy torrent that swept through the two-bedroom apartment. Beyond, in what had been the kitchen, dining room chairs lay upended, jumbled together, covered with mud and bits of straw.

Duran said he was awakened by a loud crash about 4:30 a.m. as a patio table slammed through through a glass door in his living room. He ran out of his bedroom, splashing through about a foot of water and screaming to his father, David Duran, 47, and his roommate.

Still in their underwear, the three men stumbled outside, then battled to get through a waist-deep river rushing past their front door. They made their way to an upstairs neighbor’s, but then roommate Jeff Piper, 32, waded back into their apartment to rescue their cat, Bad Dog, meowing disconsolately on a windowsill high above the water.

“We were just terrified somebody would slip and fall under the water and there would be nothing you could do,” said Mark Duran, who at one point was forced to cling to a large tree to keep from being swept downstream. “Stuff was just flying by in the water--lamps, chairs, little trees and all this straw.”

“We are just so glad to be alive,” he said. “At least with the fire, we had some warning; we had half an hour to grab a few things. With this, we had nothing.”

Hillside residents in Laguna Beach have become all too familiar with mudslides over the years. The most devastating came in October, 1978, when about 60 homes were destroyed or damaged in Bluebird Canyon after the hillside gave way.

And just 10 months ago, three homes lurched from their foundations in a mudslide in the Mystic Hills area. One of the three homes crashed 50 feet down a steep ravine and burst into flames when it became tangled in a web of utility lines.

But that disaster came after nearly two weeks of relentless, pounding rains. In contrast, Thursday’s downpour marked the first substantial rainfall of the season, and residents and city officials alike pointed to this month’s fire as one reason why the ground was so quick to give way under the water.

“There is no question in my mind,” said Mayor Lenney. “The ground over on the hills is gone, and a lot of the mud we see coming down is covered with ash from the fire.”

MacLeod of Canyon Acres said she won’t wait for an official explanation from soil specialists; she feels certain the fire sped this year’s slides. “I hate to be an alarmist, but we didn’t get this kind of heavy sliding until January last year--not the first rain.” Fearing more floods, she said she planned to stay with friends Thursday night.

The connection between the fire and the flooding could prove more than academic. Frank Kishton, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s federal coordinating officer for the fire and mudslide disaster in Laguna, toured the areas of newest damage Thursday, and an aide said later that residents of homes damaged in floods resulting from the effects of the fire will be eligible for disaster assistance.

One specialist said Thursday that this week’s mudslides were not likely to hamper plans to reseed burned-out areas and help prevent future soil erosion and flooding.

Michael Harding, an erosion specialist for Woodward-Clyde, a company hired by Laguna Beach to act as a consultant, said that while more rain is inevitable, crews should be able to use specialized techniques to hold the new seed in the soil until it germinates. His company will offer a reseeding plan to the City Council at a special meeting Saturday morning.

But some residents, already concerned that the city may not have done enough to guard against slides, said they are worried about a new round of floods.

Peter Ott, 49, a 40-year Canyon Acres resident, said Thursday’s rain was only a warning.

“It didn’t rain that hard last night. If we get an inch of rain, the whole canyon will plug up with silt,” said Ott, an artist and naturalist.

Said Blacketer of Canyon Acres: “People haven’t seen anything yet. It’s going to get heavier and heavier and the boulders will roll.”

Residents need to evacuate, she warned. “Sandbags won’t do (anything). What people need out here are canoes.”

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Times staff writers Dan Weikel, Len Hall, Rebecca Trounson, Anna Cekola and David Haldane contributed to this report.

Mud Slides Into Laguna

Rain-induced mudslides left damage in various parts of Laguna Beach. A partial list of the sites and extent of damage:

1. Canyon Acres: Mud covered roads, driveways and yards; flooding from backed-up drainage ditch

2. Laguna Canyon Road: Heavy layer of mud across all lanes; road was closed from Canyon Acres Drive to Coast Highway

3. Irvine Bowl Park: Three-foot wall of mud crashed through amphitheater, flooding orchestra pit; walls collapsed; extensive loss of office equipment and props

4. City Hall: Mud washed down hillside, coating walkways and parking lot

5. Park Avenue: Wall of mud and boulders pushed through back yards and streets; cars washed away; houses flooded; two homes heavily damaged

6. High Drive: Thick coat of mud slipped down hillside, covering street, some yards and driveways

7. Boat Canyon Park: Movement: Heavy layer of mud coated Riddle Field ballpark, rendering it unusable

8. Sawdust Festival grounds: Grounds covered in mud; fall festival to be rescheduled after cleanup

Source: Los Angeles Times reports; Researched by APRIL JACKSON / Los Angeles Times